PRODUCT-LED

GROWTH
PLAYBOOK
Implementing an Effective PLG
Strategy for Faster, More Cost
Effective Growth
 PRODUCT-LED
Product-led Growth Playbook:
Implementing an Effective PLG Strategy for Faster,
More Cost Effective Growth
First Edition
GROWTH
PLAYBOOK
Copyright © 2017 OpenView Investments, LLC
Boston, MA

Implementing an Effective PLG

All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
Strategy for Faster, More Cost
without the express written permission of the publisher Effective Growth
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

Layout design by Rachel Worthman First Edition

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword: A Product-led Growth Primer .................................................. 7

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 9

The Defining Characteristics of Product-led Growth ............................ 11

Product ......................................................................................................................................... 15

How to Optimize Your Product with Product-led Growth ............... 17

Case Study: Heap .......................................................................................................... 23

Marketing ................................................................................................................................. 29

How to Market Your Product with Product-led Growth ..................... 31

Case Study: Typeform ................................................................................................. 37

Pricing ........................................................................................................................................... 43

How to Price Your Product using Product-led Growth ........................ 45

Case Study: Meetup ..................................................................................................... 52

Sales ................................................................................................................................................ 61

Sales & Product-led Growth .................................................................................... 63

Case Study: Slack ........................................................................................................... 67

Case Study: FullStory .................................................................................................... 77

Closing .......................................................................................................................................... 83

Authors ........................................................................................................................................ 84
FOREWORD: A PRODUCT-LED
GROWTH PRIMER

The consumerization of IT – a now ubiquitous trend – has led

B2B software users to demand better experiences from the
products they rely on every day to get their jobs done. It has
also shifted the power center away from the buyer towards
the user, leaving companies scrambling to create truly one-
of-a-kind product experiences that draw users in and provide
on-the-go mobile and cloud access.

Companies like Slack, Expensify and Dropbox have

embraced this new paradigm. These companies have not
only built products their customers love and actually want
to use, but have helped to replace outdated, clunky legacy
systems that often created more pains for the user than
solutions.

Creating a truly enjoyable experience for the user also

provides meaningful returns for the product provider. The
products produced by Slack, Expensify and Dropbox
serve as the foundation for each company’s go-to-market
strategy. That is, product usage serves as the primary driver
of user acquisition, expansion and retention meaning these
companies can forgo spending large sums on traditional
marketing and sales activities. Instead, they rely on the
products themselves to supply a pipeline of satisfied users
and ‘hand raisers’ they can turn into paying customers.

This phenomenon is what OpenView has defined as product-

led growth – a capital efficient model through which
companies can scale quickly.

Foreword 7
 In this guide, we’ll walk you through the most common
characteristics that unite product-led growth companies.
We’ll also provide advice for how PLG businesses can
optimize their product, marketing, pricing and sales to scale
effectively. And if you’re a traditional sales-led business,
we’ll provide key insights into how you too can incorporate
product-led strategies to turn your existing business into a
more efficient growth engine.

INTRODUCTION

8 Product-led Growth Playbook Foreword 9

 THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS:
IS YOUR PRODUCT RIGHT FOR
PRODUCT-LED GROWTH?

There are primarily eight characteristics that product-led

growth companies embody. Without following at least some
of these eight qualities, it is extremely difficult to make a PLG
strategy work for your current product or company. These
eight characteristics are:

1. The product market conditions are right for the

strategy.

When it comes to implementing a product-led growth

strategy, the right market conditions are imperative. The
market enables product-led growth when:

»» Marginal costs of serving each user are low

»» The user plays the additional role of being the buyer,

or one of the buyers, of the product, or the users have
reasonable influence over the buyer(s)

»» The known solutions in the market are inadequate for

user needs

2. The value of the product is perceived by the user

as being a unique “highest-value-product” that they
want to use regularly.

»» The product allows the user to achieve their daily tasks

with more efficiency

10 Product-led Growth Playbook Introduction 11

 »» The experience can be personalized for the individual
user
3. The user realizes significant ongoing value quickly
and easily with little-to-no help from company
personnel.
»» The product integrates easily into other products in the
user’s product ecosystem
»» It is very clear what the product does and requires little
explanation
»» Users can use the product without creating an account
»» The initial value is real, not a “demo account” with
“dummy data”
4. The product “paywalls” follow, rather than
lead, the actual value that the user receives and
pricing scales as usage increases and more value is
delivered.
»» A free product is offered to show value and build
credibility as part of the sales process
»» As user needs become more sophisticated, customer
success and direct sales are deployed to complement
the sales process
12 Product-led Growth Playbook
5. The product has features that allow the product to
market, sell and onboard new users.
»» Users have a strong incentive to invite others to use the
product and the user of the product can easily invite
other users to use the product (viral potential)
»» The product automatically communicates through non-
product communication channels (for example email,
push notifications, text, etc.) to deliver additional value
and bring the user back into the product
»» The product monitors user behavior and makes ongoing
recommendations to the user to provide additional
value
»» Users can connect with other users to exchange ideas
from within the product
6. Marketing aims to engage users with the product
rather than engaging buyers with a sales team.
»» Users often discover the product when looking to solve
a problem
»» Users have great places to learn and exchange ideas
with other users and potential users (for example
through content marketing, online forums, Meetups,
online training and so forth)
Introduction 13
 7. The product has a built-in network effect.

»» The more people using the product in a network or

company, the more valuable it becomes

»» If it’s a platform, the more services you connect to it, the

stronger the value

8. There is a strong product champion within

companies using the product to drive greater
adoption.

If your company embodies the above eight characteristics,

you should be using a product-led growth strategy to grow PRODUCT
product adoption. In fact, a PLG strategy can impact how
you think about marketing, product optimization, pricing and
sales. Read on to learn how to implement a PLG strategy in
your company.

14 Product-led Growth Playbook Introduction 15

 HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR PRODUCT
WITH PRODUCT-LED GROWTH

The team behind Slack didn’t start out planning to build

a messaging and team collaboration app. Rather, they
spent years developing a (now defunct) multiplayer online
game called Glitch, but found it painful to work together
productively as a geographically distributed team. Their pain
was so great they allocated valuable engineering time to
develop an internal collaboration tool – what we know as
Slack today.

Kelly Watkins, Slack’s Head of Global Marketing, describes

this inauspicious founding as the secret sauce behind Slack’s
success. Since Slack started as an internal tool, “It really was
built without an agenda or vanity. It was built to solve some
very basic needs…[We thought] ‘what’s the minimum thing
that we can produce to solve our needs as a distributed
team working on a game?’”

Slack’s experience exemplifies the foundation of a successful

product. Start by solving for real user pain. Without that
foundation, no amount of optimization will be sufficient to
breathe life into your product.

This lesson is echoed by the experience of Expensify, a

travel and expense application. Expensify recognized that
people hate expense reports – a lot. So much so that the
bar Expensify needed to clear with their product wasn’t
‘expense reports you’ll love’ or even ‘good expense reports’,
but rather ‘expense reports that don’t suck!’ Jason Mills,
Expensify’s Director of Sales and Success, explains,

16 Product-led Growth Playbook Product 17

 “It’s very common for the Expensify
team to go to conferences, maybe if
we’re wearing t-shirts just in random
places people are like, ‘Oh, I hate
expense reports so much. I looked
on Google.’ A lot of people find us
organically, because we’re really
serving a need, and a pain point that
they already have.”
If your product doesn’t solve a clear and urgent pain,
stop reading and go fix that first. Otherwise, here’s how to
optimize your product to accelerate product-led growth.
Strip out anything that isn’t critical
You’re in the business of designing a product that you
want your users to love. That means cutting out any excess
complexity that doesn’t directly deliver on solving pain
for your users. This entails obsessing over the features that
people actually use and being opinionated about how the
product should be used. It requires saying ‘no’ to the laundry
list of one-off requests that buyers ask for, but that will be
over-kill for the bulk of users.
For ZipRecruiter, the rapidly growing job posting app for
small businesses, this has meant going against the grain of
what competitors were doing and holding firm to product
principles. CEO Ian Siegel emphasizes that, “If a feature
is not frequently used, we will remove it” and shares an
example of how he slimmed down analytics, contrary to
their competitors.
18 Product-led Growth Playbook
“At a time when everyone else in the industry was providing
more and more analytics data on how job ads were
performing, we found analytics were increasing the number
of calls we got to our support. In what was at the time a
controversial move, we turned off a large portion of the
analytic information we provided. The result? There was a
massive immediate drop in inbound support questions with
no impact to business performance.”
Monitoring and analytics provider Datadog takes a
similar approach, despite being in an industry that isn’t
traditionally known for keeping things simple. “Datadog
is taking a lot of things that have been done previously
in monitoring companies and making the experience so
easy, so straightforward, so intuitive that it’s no biggie,” VP
of Marketing Alex Rosemblat underscores. They do that in
two ways, first by focusing on the key problems they want
to solve and secondly, by making it seamless for the user
to solve those problems. This sets Datadog apart from their
competitors that, according to Rosemblat, “Were so difficult
to use that even though they did solve a problem, it was a
problem to actually make it solve a problem.”
Deliver value immediately
Great product-led businesses take this radically simple
approach to designing products and apply it to how they
onboard new users. Their goal is to make it extremely fast for
users to get started and see results, which will make the user
want to come back over and over again.
At a company like SurveyMonkey, for example, that could
mean getting a user to easily design their first survey and
Product 19

then receiving at least five survey responses. Once that
hurdle has been cleared, the user is probably going to come
back to the application again and again and need more
sophisticated functionality (for instance, advanced survey
building tools, team collaboration, analytical tools, etc.).
For Join.me, it means making joining a meeting as seamless
as possible. That sounds easy, but is harder than it looks. Join.
me’s former VP of eCommerce, Eric Bisceglia, says that, “The
idea was ‘How can we just make it super, super simple to
get into a meeting?’ No downloads, no concerns or worries,
just join the meeting.”
Datadog’s Rosemblat notes that they want to make it as
easy to sign up for Datadog as starting a Facebook account.
“People are up and running with Datadog within minutes,
maybe something very complex might take you a couple
of hours to do,” he commented This is again unique for the
industry, and for most enterprise-grade software.
Users don’t want to have to sit through hours and hours of
product onboarding or training videos to get started. Rather,
product-led businesses guide their users to complete the
key functions they need in the context of what they want to
do. Slack, for example, stays away from traditional email
onboarding and instead focuses on in-app notifications,
which educate users at the exact moment they need
guidance. Kelly Watkins explains,
20 Product-led Growth Playbook
“We believe that [product education]
really makes sense in context. You’d
look at where somebody is in their
lifecycle as a user, what are they
thinking about doing at that particular
moment and then we’re trying to
communicate value to them at that
point.”
Make the product stick
All of this work doesn’t stop at onboarding. Top product-led
businesses continually focus on driving more usage and
integrating their products into users’ day to day lives. That’s
because they recognize that product usage is the ‘canary in
the coal mine’; it predicts when a user is likely to upgrade,
expand their purchase and renew their subscription.
Companies can then drive product changes, in-app
communication and human intervention to incent behaviors
that they know will increase customer lifetime value.
HubSpot makes a great case in point. They take product
analytics extremely seriously, according to former VP
of Engineering Yoav Shapira. HubSpot brings together
disparate data sources like firmographics, feature usage
and economic value delivered, and they’ve found that this
accurately predicts retention even within the first few days
of a customer’s onboarding. Armed with those insights,
HubSpot’s account management team knows exactly which
accounts to focus on and how they should be influencing
customer behavior to drive the most impact. These initiatives
Product 21
 have helped HubSpot reduce churn and bring net dollar
retention above 100% – not easy for a company that sells to
small and midsize businesses.
All of this may sound straightforward on paper. The real
challenge comes in building the muscle internally to stay
laser focused on the pain point for which you’re solving, strip
out everything that isn’t essential and continuously improve
as you learn from customers. Given the knockout success of
ZipRecruiter, Slack, Datadog and others, being disciplined
about your product and implementing a product-led
approach can add up to serious returns.
22 Product-led Growth Playbook
CASE STUDY: HOW HEAP’S MATIN
MOVASSATE IS BUILDING A PRODUCT
THAT SELLS ITSELF
“The typical sales conversation with an analytics provider
revolves around things like mapping out a tracking plan and
drafting an implementation timeline,” says Matin Movassate,
co-founder and CEO at Heap. “We’ve tried to eliminate a
lot of that implementation work. Instead of the traditional
sales process — in which you try to figure out a long-term
timeline after the prospect has committed money — we want
prospects to gain insight during the sales process.”
This unique approach is an example of Product-led Growth
(PLG). While there are variations on what it actually looks
like in action, the basic idea behind a PLG strategy is that
product usage is the primary driver of customer acquisition
and expansion, without requiring the intervention of a sales
rep – it’s fundamentally different than the traditional sales-led
approach that caters to economic buyers first and end users
second. This is made possible by built-in product features that
automate certain marketing, sales, and customer success
functions.
Movassate founded Heap to eliminate the bottlenecks that
prevent business users from turning data and analytics into
real insights. Heap helps to bring data science to the masses
by “automating the annoying parts of user analytics.” The
product automatically captures all user actions in web or
mobile apps – no event tracking required. This means that
Heap customers can answer any user analytics question
instantly with no engineering work required. And whatever
Product 23
 question you ask, the data is already there because Heap
tracks everything. They call it “instant retroactive analytics.”
By delivering instant results, Heap is reducing time-to-
value, or as Movassate describes it “time-to-insight,” a key
differentiator against other analytics providers with long
configuration processes.
This philosophy of delivering value also applies to Heap’s
go-to-market efforts. “All of our marketing positioning stems
from the problems we’re trying to solve in the product and
the sorts of users we’re building the product for,” Movassate
explains. By putting the product front and center, as
opposed to leading with sales and marketing, Movassate
and his team are able to create a situation where prospects
come to Heap already being “pre-sold” on the product and
the value it can deliver.
For Heap, the sales process has become something akin to
proactive customer success. “Our best sales conversations
are the ones in which we serve as a data scientist
consultant,” Movassate says. “In these instances, the client
has installed Heap (a process that only takes seconds), so
on the first or second sales call we’re already able to share
insights that we’ve uncovered. We’re able to suggest that
they might want to take a different marketing approach,
invest in the development of additional features, or focus on
a particular segment of users that we can tell — based on the
data — will be important for the customer’s business. That’s
the most effective way we sell Heap.”
24 Product-led Growth Playbook
A Product that Sells Itself: Driving Growth through
the Product
While unconventional, this product-led approach to growth
is clearly working for Heap. Well into its fourth year, the
company is going strong and Movassate is only now
beginning to build out a marketing team. “By and large,
our biggest marketing channel to this point has been word-
of-mouth,” says Movassate, validating the product’s ability
to sell itself. And, while Movassate believes that marketing
can play an important role in identifying new channels and
creating content to educate the market, he also believes that
there’s a high value in continuing to drive growth directly via
the product.
“Heap is most successful when a higher percentage of a
company’s workforce is using it,” he explains. “We have the
opportunity to help improve adoption within an organization
by adding in-product features and functionality that make
it easier for people to share Heap-generated insights and
onboard new teammates to the software. Using the product
as a marketing channel is a growth engineering strategy
that will help us increase usage and make our product more
attractive to larger companies.”
So, what goes on behind the scenes at a company that is
embracing product-led growth? What kinds of operational
and strategic elements have to be in play to make this
kind of strategy viable? The details vary from company to
company and are based on level of product maturation, but
a closer look at how the Heap team moves forward provides
some interesting insights that just might be universally
applicable.
Product 25
 Intentional, Data-driven Growth Engineering
“In the product lifecycle and in people’s roles, we always
try to make sure we use data,” Movassate says. “But today,
our growth engineering practice is a distributed rather than
a dedicated role. It’s sort of everyone’s responsibility.” You
would expect as much from a company that is seeking to
give more workers access to actionable insights from robust
user analytics, and thereby democratizing data science.
Indeed, one of the reasons they have so far been successful
without this role is because Heap uses Heap.
Despite the distributed nature of Heap’s growth engineering
practice, the team is very intentional about every move
they make. “When we’re thinking about adding or building
out a certain feature, we first try to get a clear sense of the
problem we’re trying to solve,” Movassate explains. “We
make sure we can identify which part of the funnel we’re
addressing and the impact the feature will have on our
business. If there is no compelling story there — no data to
suggest that the effort is a high-leverage use of our time —
we won’t do it. Essentially, the question to ask is not, ‘can we
make this change,’ but ‘should we make this change?’ It’s
about prioritization based on impact.”
On the back end, once a feature is built, the team is quick
to solicit and analyze user response. “We expose users to
each new feature as early as we can, and we use Heap
to see how they’re using the feature so we can understand
the paths they’re taking,” Movassate says. “And then,
when a new feature is fully launched, we are disciplined
about measuring the success metrics to determine if people
are using it, whether it’s affecting retention or activation,
26 Product-led Growth Playbook
and whether it’s something that’s coming up in sales
conversations. All this data informs how we should refine and
build that and future features.” This is what agile product-led
growth looks like in action. It’s letting the data inform what to
do next, and not showing undue loyalty to pet features that
simply aren’t working.
Well-defined Core Audience
For PLG to really work, it’s imperative that you have an
accurate and deep understanding of your audience and
their needs. “In terms of our buyer, we need to be very,
very focused,” says Movassate. “We know that the most
successful buyer persona for Heap is someone who wants
to make their organization data-driven.” For Heap, this
individual might be in any one of a number of titles from
Data Scientist/Analyst to Product to CTO. The title may vary,
but the persona is the same.
After honing in on the key persona, the Heap team then
needs to consider the wide variety of technical and non-
technical end users on the customer’s side, including
developers, product managers, analysts, and marketers.
“We start by identifying common use cases and then
creating interfaces within our product to make it easy for
people who don’t want to dive into writing SQL or running
a mass-produced job to get the insights they need,” says
Movassate. “Basically, we try to build intuitive tools that
serve the needs of about 80% of our user base. The other
20% includes developers and data scientists who we serve
through robust APIs, good documentation, and customer
success.”
Product 27
 As Movassate and his team continue to embody product-
led growth, even while testing traditional marketing efforts,
they’re keen to make sure the product delivers on the stated
goal of unlocking insights through automation. “We need
to think through the user experience from end-to-end and
remove all the unnecessary barriers.” It’s this line of thinking
that reduces time-to-insight for new users while continuing to
deliver new insights to the existing 5,000+ customers.

MARKETING

28 Product-led Growth Playbook Product 29

 HOW TO MARKET YOUR PRODUCT WITH
PRODUCT-LED GROWTH

If you’re deploying a product-led growth (PLG) strategy

for your business, you’ve likely got a killer product that
solves one, if not many, customer pain points. You might be
tempted then to rely on your product and word of mouth
as driving forces for growth. Beware though, this approach
could leave you exposed to competitors. On the flip side,
you don’t want to open the floodgates on expensive
marketing campaigns given the need to run a capital-
efficient business. That’s where a product-led approach to
marketing comes in.

It’s all about striking the right balance of smart, yet significant
growth that complements your broader PLG strategy. While
no two companies are the same, there are commonalities
across the most successful product-led growth companies
when it comes to messaging, targeting and marketing
that we’ll discuss in this article. You’ll learn how to tweak
these methods to meet your own needs and tailor the best
strategies to fit your product and market.

Target Your Users, Not Buyers

The backbone of any marketing strategy should be a

streamlined message explaining exactly what your product
does. According to Ian Siegel, CEO at ZipRecruiter, “Every
business only sells one thing.” So, if you surveyed your
customers, what would they say you sold? If you spent
more than 60 seconds trying to answer this question – or

30 Product-led Growth Playbook Marketing 31

 if you’ve never validated your assumptions, go ask them!
For PLG companies like Asana and Expensify, their product
and customer experience truly live up to their taglines,
“Teamwork without email” and “Expense reports that don’t
suck.”
So what do these taglines have in common? They speak
directly to would-be users, not buyers. This subtle difference
is a core pillar of product-led growth marketing. Unlike
traditional companies that market to buyers and rely on a
top-down approach, product-led growth companies build
their user base from the ground up, relying on virality and
shadow IT to bring the product to entire organization.
You must construct your brand messaging and voice to
resonate with end users – those whose daily life will be
improved because of your product. Your goal should be to
build an army of champions that will drive change in their
organizations. Take Expensify for example – they’ve built
their business by focusing on a goal of making their users’
lives better, or ‘suck less’ – however you want to look at it. To
do that though, they haven’t relied on costly paid advertising
campaigns targeting heads of accounting departments nor
do they have sales reps cold calling CFOs spewing ROI stats.
CEO David Barrett states, “Our users outnumber the buyers
100:1. They are the ones with the power.” And that says it
all. PLG companies need to rely on a ground up strategy,
which brings not only cost-efficiency, but builds trust.
Expensify’s end-user-first mentality has led to tremendous
growth in part because those satisfied users in turn become
such strong advocates for the product and convince
accounting managers and CFOs to purchase the product for
32 Product-led Growth Playbook
entire companies. Correctly implementing a PLG marketing
strategy allows your users to essentially market and sell your
product for you.
But this is no easy feat. To accomplish this, keep in mind
winning over users isn’t just about a building a killer product,
but also a killer brand to go along with it. The voice of your
brand should be relatable and trustworthy – one that’s
focused on making the working lives of users better. Slack
has done this especially well, as Drift explains here:
“It’s as if the founders of Slack understood what it’s like
to work in an office, on a team. So instead of blasting us
with jargon, they developed a brand voice that sounds
like the voice of a trusted friend or colleague — someone
who’s in the trenches with us, but who isn’t afraid to crack
a joke and have some fun every now and then. This
playful-yet-helpful style carries over seamlessly into the
product, where the colors, micro-copy, signature “knock
knock” notification sound, and fun features like Slackbot all
contribute to a cohesive (and lovable) brand experience.”
The Metrics that Matter Most
Just as nailing messaging is crucial, we can’t ignore the
metrics. There is a seemingly endless list of metrics
marketing teams track with varying levels of accuracy. The
most common marketing metrics revolve around lead
volume,
Marketing 33
 lead conversion and engagement. What sets PLG companies
apart is that they aren’t just focused on the top of the funnel,
but the end to end customer experience. The most successful
PLG companies don’t stop tracking leads once a BDR is
assigned or even once a customer first enters their credit
card information. Instead, marketing at PLG companies is
centered on customer advocacy with a goal of ensuring
that each and every customer is successful in their use and
adoption of the product. The best PLG companies realize
that paying customers are an extension of the marketing and
sales team. Keeping these customers happy will in turn fuel
your growth. This is precisely why Slack’s number one metric
is net promoter score, as highlighted here by former Slack
CMO and CRO Bill Macaitis:
“I tell my team members that their gold
standard is not whether customers
bought a product, but did they
recommend us? It’s a higher bar
and a different standard. We also
don’t see marketing’s role as getting
customers in the door and then
wiping our hands and going on to the
next one. Marketing’s role is about
recommendation, so we spend a lot of
time building up playbooks and putting
together hints and tips on how to get
the most out of Slack.”
34 Product-led Growth Playbook
More importantly, though, is the need to define and
communicate your gold standard – whether that’s net
promoter score or another metric. Your team needs to be
aligned on the primary metric for which they should be
optimizing. Doing so will not only guide your marketing
experiments, but also your product development.
Your Product is a Type of Marketing
Your product is a key form of marketing – after all, that is a
core tenet of product-led growth. So virality should be baked
into everything you do. Your product must incentivize users to
invite others to use the product by ensuring their experience
only becomes more valuable and enjoyable as more of their
peers sign on. The idea of your product serving as a means
of empowering users to refer other users are core to products
like Slack, Dropbox and Typeform – three classic product-led
growth companies. Both Slack and Dropbox allow users to
invite others to the product – Dropbox even incentivized this
referral program with free storage. While Typeform updated
the footer of their product from “Powered by Typeform” to
“Create A Typeform.” Doing so doubled their click-through
rate from respondents and led to new user growth.
But the best part of this virality other than continued growth?
Users don’t expect to receive a monetary gain in return for
inviting others. They are incentivized to refer and invite others
because doing so increases the value they get out of the
product. Another prime example of this is InVision, an award-
winning product design platform. The majority of the referrals
they receive are from their users sharing prototypes, rather
than their traditional referral program. Allowing your product
to serve as a key marketing tool can be a cheap, reliable
Marketing 35
 means to acquiring more customers. The growth could be
exponential so don’t skimp on developing viral aspects of
your offering.
Prioritizing Your Marketing Channels
Beyond intra-product marketing, where should PLG marketers
look to drive growth? Organic channels of course.
Users search daily for ways to alleviate their pain points. And
you want to be there when they do. To do this, you need
a strong content marketing strategy. Your content should
educate prospects, free users and existing customers on both
direct and complementary topics. And please, quality over
quantity! Aim for two epic pieces of content that engage
your prospect to the point where they are sharing it with
colleagues and friends, rather than 20 pieces of average
content. Don’t necessarily gate your content. Your brand
should be a trusted advisor, not a gatekeeper of information.
Take this idea of knowledge sharing beyond just content
marketing via SEO and social. Look to create communities,
both online and off.
In the end, your marketing strategy should have a user-first
mentality. This means relaying a clear message of exactly
what your product does and the pains it can solve. Speak
directly to the end user in a relatable, knowledgeable and
trustworthy way. Hold your marketing efforts to the highest
bar of customer satisfaction – net promoter score. Cultivate
communities and provide valuable insights and content. By
doing this, you’ll create an army of champions that will
multiply your marketing efforts and put your product-led
company on a clear path to success.
36 Product-led Growth Playbook
CASE STUDY: HOW TYPEFORM
APPROACHES SCALING A GLOBAL SAAS
PLATFORM
Scaling a growth engine starts with segmentation. Define
your target customer, buyer and use case. Then focus your
messaging and outreach on that segment, and watch the
MRR pile up. Easy, right?
But what if your product can be used by anyone, anywhere
for anything? Not so easy.
This is the reality for Typeform. “We are a mass market tool
that solves very different problems for very different people,”
says Director of Growth, Pedro Magriço. “We don’t want to
go after only one market.”
The company started as a Q&A-style alternative to old school
forms and surveys. But customers quickly began using the
product for lots of other things – from job applications to
ecommerce shopping carts. Where others might see chaos,
Typeform saw the opportunity to build a platform.
Scaling a SaaS product into a mass market platform is no
easy task. Magriço has developed an approach to growth
that allows Typeform to tackle unique challenges and
embrace a diverse set of customers globally.
Marketing 37
 The Messaging Challenge
Typeform has tens of thousands of customers spanning all
sizes, industries, use cases and geographies. This kind of
customer diversity creates a messaging challenge. With
so many different customer segments, who do you target?
Who’s this product for and what exactly does it do?
“We can’t be too narrow and turn people away. But super
broad messaging comes across as vague and confusing,”
says Magriço. “A product that can do everything doesn’t
end up being used for anything.”
Typeform’s messaging focuses on the product’s underlying
value, regardless of the customer’s size, industry or use case.
“Typeform has a conversational interface, which feels more
human and leads to higher completion rates.”
38 Product-led Growth Playbook
Once a customer is in the funnel, they start seeing more
content personalized to their role and Typeform templates
relevant to their use case.
Amplifying Virality with Product Growth
Customers usually hear about Typeform because someone
else asked them to fill out a typeform. The product is
inherently viral, and Magriço focuses on amplifying that
virality through a strategy he calls “Product Growth.”
Product Growth involves both marketers and developers,
who together make changes to the product to increase
top-of-funnel and optimize conversion. Sometimes the minor
tweaks can have huge impact. For example, changing
“Powered by Typeform” to “Create A Typeform” on the free
product doubled the click-through rate from respondents.
“No one uses Typeform in single-player mode,” says
Magriço . “The sole purpose for creating a Typeform is to ask
someone else for feedback. We use this to our advantage
and do everything we can to enhance the product’s virality.”
A Little More Human
Beyond virality, the way you scale a mass market product is
by developing a brand that people love. It’s why MailChimp
and SquareSpace are leaders in relatively commoditized
categories. I’m not a MailChimp customer, but you better
Marketing 39
 believe I rushed to claim the free Freddie action figure I
heard about on a podcast advertisement.
“Ultimately, people find you and stick with you because
you have a great product and a brand that resonates with
them,” says Magriço. “The web is amazing to reach a lot
of people, but it puts you behind a screen and you lose
the human element. We’ve designed our product around a
conversational interface because it brings a more natural,
more human feel to customer and employee interactions.”
“We are here to make the web more human. That’s our
brand. You see it in our product, but you also see it in our
content, our emails and even our tweets. We strive to make
all of our marketing more engaging, beautiful and human.”
Typeform’s blog is called “A Little More Human” and the
brand comes through loud and clear in their content.
40 Product-led Growth Playbook
Making Sales More Human
What about sales? People generally don’t like being sold to
and it feels way more transactional than human.
“Typeform is a mass-market product built on self-service,
and we want to maintain that discipline as we grow. But we
do have lots of large companies using Typeform at massive
scale.”
This means shifting from pure self-service to human touch. The
goal is to help these large companies get more value out of
Typeform. It’s not about identifying and exploiting potential
whales in the customer base.
To emphasize the human orientation, the sales team is a part
of customer success rather than Magriço’s growth team. The
message is very much, “Hey, I saw that you just started using
Typeform. That’s great. I’m here to make you successful. How
can I help?”
“We want to help our customers get more out of Typeform,
whether or not they pay us more money.”
Marketing 41
 PRICING

42 Product-led Growth Playbook Marketing 43

 HOW TO PRICE YOUR PRODUCT USING
PRODUCT-LED GROWTH

The goal of every product-led business should be to get the

product in the hands of the user as quickly and as seamlessly
as possible. By removing any barriers in the way of initial
usage, you’re giving users the chance to truly experience
your product free from marketing, sales or any other
disruptions.

But doing so means you’ll have to offer something of initial

value for free. This could certainly come in the form of a
freemium edition, as is the case with Trello, Slack, Expensify,
Evernote, UberConference, Drift and countless other
products.

The Freemium Approach

Freemium works particularly well for companies operating in

markets with millions of potential users, when there’s virality
and network effects built into the product, or when you have
the capital to worry about monetization later.

In the case of Expensify, a travel and expense app, a

freemium offering enables the company to appeal to end
users who are sick and tired of outdated expense reports.
They want to make it as simple as possible for these users to
find and use the product. Monetization happens later, with
features that appeal to accounting teams who need more
sophistication and customization. As Jason Mills, Director of
Sales and Success at Expensify puts it,

44 Product-led Growth Playbook Pricing 45


“A lot of people find us organically because we’re really
serving a need and a pain point they already have. We
just happen to be very highly rated, easy to find and have
a great business model, because it’s free to sign up and
[someone can] use the product without having to necessarily
make a buying decision.”
With Drift, a sales communication platform, they’ve
recognized that the virality built into their free product serves
essentially as free advertising for the business. As CEO David
Cancel explains,
“Another reason to go free is because we want to get on
as many business websites as possible. We’re willing to
play along. But every one of those business websites is free
advertising and a referral back to Drift, so why wouldn’t
we?”
But contrary to popular belief, a freemium model isn’t a
necessary component of product-led growth. Conversion
rates on freemium plans are notoriously low, typically
hovering between 3 and 5%, and can attract users who
aren’t in your target market. Moreover, if you make the free
offering too good, you could end up competing against
yourself in a deal. As Craig Walker, Founder and CEO at
DialPad notes,
46 Product-led Growth Playbook
“We made our free service almost
too good so we have a lot of very
dedicated, very happy free users,
and sometimes we have a hard time
upselling them because they’re like,
“Hey, why would I need anything
else?” Our stiffest competition is coming
from ourselves!”
The Free Trial
An alternative to a freemium offering is a free trial that
doesn’t require the user to enter credit card information in
order to sign up. This method is employed by companies
like Datadog and Deputy. Alternatively, you might offer a
free feature that ties back to the value of your core product
offering as HubSpot did with Website Grader.
Yoav Shapira, who served as VP of Engineering at HubSpot
during their hyper-growth years, describes how this worked
and why it was a good way to quickly prove value to users,
“Trials are good to do, but trials are often too long. At
HubSpot we had a tool called Website Grader… Its entire
existence was about creating time to value. It’s free. You put
in a URL – your site or your competitor’s – and we analyze
the site using our marketing methodology.”
Join.me, the online meeting software provider, took a
different approach. Initially, new Join.me users would start
with a 14-day free trial of their premium product. After
Pricing 47
 the 14 days, a user could either pay up to keep using the
upgraded model or let their trial lapse and be kicked down
to the basic version of Join.me. This strategy enabled the
company to capture individual users who hadn’t been
granted licenses to costlier products. Join.me’s VP of Product
Marketing at the time, Eric Bisceglia, explains,
“The perpetually free model in the early days actually fueled
very, very massive adoption because there was nothing
good in the market that was doing that…It got to the point
where in a few years, we had millions of new users each
week.”
Over time, Join.me’s rapid growth signaled to the company
that a freemium product might no longer be necessary to
sustain growth. Instead, they discovered a better way to
monetize their users. Bisceglia notes,
“The decision was made to end-of-life the free product,
move solely to a 14-day free trial, and if you don’t buy, you
get nothing, and you have to pay to continue. It actually
turned out that there was a huge opportunity to monetize
that base by turning off that fully free product and going just
purely to a free trial model.”
Monetizing Your User Base
Now that you’ve got your product in the hands of as many
users as possible, and they’ve fallen in love, it’s time to
monetize that value you’ve created for your users. Successful
product-led businesses set up scalable monetization models
that make it easy to land-and-expand their customer base.
48 Product-led Growth Playbook
PLG companies land paying customers by being strategic
about the features they place in paid plans and when they
attempt to convert free users into paying customers. But they
don’t stop there. PLG companies then use value metrics and
different product tiers to increase ARPU.
Dropbox, for instance, takes a very data-driven approach to
identifying what features they can monetize to upsell existing
users and strike the right balance between user happiness
and monetization. They do so with in-depth user research
and customer development, and incorporating pricing into
those conversations. As Giancarlo Lionetti, who heads up
Product Marketing and Demand Generation at Dropbox for
Business shares,
“We really respect the value that we give to the user with the
free product, but we do a lot of aggressive testing to see like
what that threshold is. What do our users really care about?
… One we’ll do a lot of surveying. We’ll ask our users, do
they value X feature enough to pay for it, right? There’s a lot
of interactions with our users so we really understand the
value they’re getting. And if it’s worth actual dollars to them,
or is it just amusing. We do conjoints, we do user studies.”
Slack makes another great example. Their core offering is
free for an unlimited period of time, but its message archives
are capped at 10,000 messages and file storage is limited
to 5GB. Once a free user runs up against those limitations,
Slack has in-app notifications suggesting that users upgrade
to a paid version. Kelly Watkins, Head of Global Marketing
at Slack explains,
Pricing 49
 “One of the differences between a free plan and our paid
plans is that one could transition to a paid plan so you have
access to your entire archive of messages for all time. On
the free plan, that’s limited to 10,000 of your most recent
messages. So generally within the product, when you get
to that threshold of 10,000 messages and go over that, we
have a very small notification to you that says, “Hey, you
know if you would like to have access to your entire archive,
that’s available, and here’s how you access that.”
include key features in paid plans that users are willing to
pay for and communicate with your customers when their
usage indicates that they’re ready to pay up. Finally, grow
accounts over time with value metrics and packages that
naturally scale as customers get more and more hooked on
the product. With these tips, you’ll be able to implement a
well-oiled PLG approach to pricing in no time.

Expensify similarly tracks usage to pinpoint when a company

may be ready to become a paying customer. Specifically,
what they’ve found, according to Jason Mills, is as follows:

“If you get about three or more users in

your company submitting things your
way, that’s a signal to us that there’s
a latent opportunity here. And that’s
an opportunity that we need to reach
out and have a better conversation
around.”

Expensify also charges based on the number of active

users, which gives them a great expansion opportunity as
individuals share Expensify with their teams, and then their
departments and entire companies.

In summary, start by making it incredibly easy for people

to use your product. The value should come before the
paywall sets in. After they’ve fallen in love with your product,

50 Product-led Growth Playbook Part II: Pricing at the Expansion Stage 51

 CASE STUDY: HOW MEETUP TOOK A
PRODUCT-LED APPROACH TO PRICING
ITS ENTERPRISE PRODUCT
As anyone in the SaaS world knows, sometimes it takes a
few tries to get a thing right. Whether you’re talking about
releasing a new feature, breaking into a new market, or
adjusting product-market fit, sometimes finding a working
solution requires coming at the challenge from a new (and
even unexpected) direction. This is exactly the approach
Brian Lafayette, VP of Revenue at Meetup, and his team took
in order to crack the code on how to reach and engage
their B2B market.
The story of their success involves overcoming internal
skepticism, facing up to past failures, and then forging
ahead with a product-led growth strategy that not only
helped them reach their original goals, but also provided
the added benefit of uncovering an unanticipated earning
opportunity that they now forecast could account for up to
30% of future revenue. And, like so many success stories, this
one starts with failure.
52 Product-led Growth Playbook
The Situation – Shaky Ground
“This definitely wasn’t the first time we’d tried to connect
with the B2B audience,” says Lafayette. “Meetup has been
building local communities for thirteen years, and the team
here had experimented with a number of strategies including
Meetup Everywhere, corporate Meetup sponsorships, and
even branded perks and incentives; but nothing seemed to
stick.” Despite these failed attempts, it was clear to Lafayette
that the B2B audience represented a worthwhile opportunity.
In fact, he knew that some businesses were already running
groups on Meetup. The problem was that these businesses
had to use a workaround in order to achieve the scale they
needed in terms of the number of groups they wanted to run
and the geographic spread of those groups.
To accommodate these “edge” cases, the Meetup team
hacked their own system so they could manually override
the three-group maximum that was in place for individual
users. Despite the awkwardness of the process, Lafayette
was intrigued and encouraged by the fact that none of the
companies that signed up for this modified subscription ever
canceled.
The catalyst for Lafayette’s reengagement with the challenge
of serving the B2B audience was a phone call from Google
Developers Groups. They were running about 700 groups
all over the world, and they were looking to consolidate
and unify those groups on one platform. Discussions
with their developers, who had been running the groups
independently across a variety of platforms, indicated that
the general preference was to use Meetup. From there, the
conversation opened up to talk about requirements, and the
ball was rolling.
Part II: Pricing at the Expansion Stage 53
 The Plan – A Detailed Model and an Aggressive Goal
Very early on, Lafayette was emphatic about building
something that would meet not only Google’s immediate
needs, but that would also serve the long term vision
for Meetup’s overall business. “We’re an independent
company,” he says, “So, even if Google was knocking on
our door, the leadership team agreed that we needed to be
strategic about how to move forward. We didn’t want to let
this one project become a distraction from other things we
could be working on.”
Past failures to connect with the B2B audience had left
the leadership team feeling skeptical about the viability
of another attempt, so Lafayette’s first step was to get
leadership buy in. To do this, he built a model to forecast the
growth potential of the B2B business. “We set a really hard
target with a minimum goal of $10 million in five years,” he
says. “We then defined the criteria that would allow us to
meet that goal: how many paying customers, how many
groups each customer would have to be running, and the
overall mix of customers based on the different price points
we planned to offer.”
This detailed plan served several purposes. First, it helped to
sell the concept internally based on the revenue potential.
Second, it gave the leadership team an easy out by clearly
articulating the conditions the team had to meet in order
to keep the project alive. And, finally, it provided very
concrete guidance for the sales team. “We essentially had
a model that forecasted trajectory, and then — as the inputs
came in — we could update that to show we were still on
the right path,” Lafayette explains. “The model also gave
54 Product-led Growth Playbook
our sales team super-specific, month-by-month targets that
made it easy for us to see exactly when they were falling
short, so that we could make proactive changes to improve
conversion.”
The Research – The Good, The Bad, and The
Unknown
With the plan approved, Lafayette’s next step was research.
“The first thing we did was bring in people who had worked
on the past sponsorship, perks, and Meetup Everywhere
projects,” he says. “We asked what went wrong and
learned that the common point of failure was an assumption
that large numbers of Meetup groups could be run by a
centralized administrator without the support of local people
on the ground.” In addition to shedding light on a major
customer-side problem, this observation also provided an
important internal insight for Lafayette, “Discovering that
long-distance group management was a key problem
helped us realize that if what you build doesn’t leverage
your core product, then — even if it does kind of work — you
will lose support quickly because the project will be viewed
as a distraction from the core business.”
Meetup’s core product had always been about facilitating
and mobilizing local groups. The previous attempts became
a distraction because they used different ways to facilitate
local interaction. For example, with Meetup Everywhere an
entirely different website was built, and the Meetups didn’t
appear in the company’s core product. “It was something
completely separate from our core product that didn’t really
make it any stronger,” says Lafayette. “Now, With Meetup
Pro, organizers use all the same tools as our individual
Part II: Pricing at the Expansion Stage 55
 product, but the central administrator can push notifications
and other items out to them.”
Building off of their initial learnings, Lafayette’s team
then interviewed current businesses that were using the
workaround solution. “We talked with existing customers
about possible features, what would be most interesting to
them, and how they were using Meetup for their existing
groups,” Lafayette says. “We also had the price discussion so
we could begin to understand the different price thresholds.”
The First Step – A Landing Page for a Nonexistent
Product
Insights from the research phase (internal conversations,
customer interviews, and also analysis of historical pricing
trends) pointed toward a segmented approach. “We saw
that for-profit businesses would be willing to pay a lot more if
we could offer them a few simple enhancements,” Lafayette
says, “So we narrowed our focus to the audience segment
with the willingness and ability to pay a premium for a
better value and then created a tiered pricing structure that
addressed three customer types: big for-profit businesses,
small for-profit businesses, and nonprofits/startups.”
While Lafayette had a strong hypothesis, he had no way to
be sure that the price ranges the team had defined were
viable. To validate whether they could sell the product at the
target prices, Meetup’s product, engineering, design, and
sales teams had to take the offer to the market. “Essentially,
before the Pro product even existed, we created a landing
page for it,” he explains. “We added two quick features: a
map page that displayed the customer’s network of Meetup
56 Product-led Growth Playbook
groups in one place as ‘My Network,’ and an admin page
that allowed owners to message all members across all
groups simultaneously.”
With this modest minimum viable product in place, the team
was ready to start working toward meeting the sales goals
outlined in the forecast model.
The Sales Strategy – Small Changes with Big Effects
“We started off thinking we might be able to get new
companies to bring their groups onto the Meetup platform,”
Lafayette recalls. “But, it didn’t go that well. We quickly
realized that the approach didn’t work because it was kind
of difficult for someone to run meetups if they had to start
from scratch, not understanding how it all works.” After that
false start, the team was pleasantly surprised to see a lot
of unexpected interest from existing customers on the old,
hacked “product.” In addition to upgrading many of those
customers to the Pro version, the team also got some leads
through a kick-off event they ran on an industry forum.
But, where the team really started to gain traction, was when
they began making subtle, in-product adjustments to reduce
friction in the customer experience. Though the changes
were small, they made a big difference in helping automate
the up-sell process:
»» They featured Meetup Pro prominently in the help
section
»» They began routing people who tried to add a fourth
group directly to sales. (In the past, people who tried
Part II: Pricing at the Expansion Stage 57
 to exceed the three-group limit would be denied and
would have to write the customer support team for a
manual override.)
»» They implemented a simple, third-party form that
allowed customers to sign up for the Pro product
without having to call a support or sales person.
»» They removed the step of having customers sign a
comprehensive master service agreement (MSA), a
requirement that was creating a bottleneck with legal
departments.
»» They enabled credit card payments. (Previously, the
only method of payment was by mailed check.)
Each of these changes might seem inconsequential on
its own, but together they helped to create a much more
efficient customer experience that enabled a self-managed
up-sell for customers who were already familiar with the
Meetup product. “We realized that we were getting way,
way more traction with people who already had some
groups and activity on the network because they already
understood the value of Meetup and the role it plays in their
organization,” Lafayette explains. “From there, it was just a
matter of helping them see how easily they could upgrade to
Pro so they could manage their groups in a scalable way.”
The Future – Focus, Proof Points, and Smart
Scalability
Roughly seven months after the Pro product launched, the
user base has grown to more than 200 organizations that
58 Product-led Growth Playbook
between them run more than 5,000 paying groups. Perhaps
even more impressive than the subscription numbers is the
fact that, so far, the product has 100% retention. “One of the
keys to our retention rate is that we kept the original hacked
solution ‘product’ as a kind of backup option,” Lafayette
says. By doing this, Lafayette ensures that customers who
don’t convert to the Pro product after their three-month trial
still have a product option on the platform.
“We essentially use the original solution like a down-sell,”
he explains. “For people who don’t want to pay for the
full upgrade, we can offer a solution with fewer features
(no admin page, etc.) at a lower cost that allows them
to maintain all of their existing groups and add as many
new groups as they want.” On the back end, the team has
removed the formerly awkward operational process by
simplifying the infrastructure so that both the Pro product
and the down-sell option use the same billing system. After
updating forecasts, Lafayette believes that by keeping
people on the platform, this “down-sell” product will
eventually account for about 30% of future revenue.
After their initial success with Pro, Lafayette and his team are
now working on the most efficient and profitable way to take
the product to the next stage. At the moment, Pro is still flying
somewhat under the radar because the team isn’t ready
to open it up to the full Meetup user base. “We’re not yet
ready to handle the demand,” Lafayette admits. “Right now,
we’re focused on engaging only the most highly qualified
customers and figuring out what’s left to prove in the product
to confirm that this is a business we want to invest in for the
future. We’re hoping to find those proof points as quickly as
possible so we can build out anything we need to have to
Part II: Pricing at the Expansion Stage 59
 support the scaling of the product, and then tell all 17,000
of our likely-to-upgrade customers about it.” Sounds like
Meetup Pro will be a product to watch.

SALES

60 Product-led Growth Playbook Part II: Pricing at the Expansion Stage 61

 SALES & PRODUCT-LED GROWTH

You’ve built a phenomenal product. One that everyone (and

their mother, brother, coworker, and friend) wants to use.
More importantly, you’ve built your company around the
idea that you are different. You live to serve your customer,
to make a product that delights and excites and doesn’t
get bogged down in procurement cycles and delayed
implementations. You don’t want your company aligned
around a boiler room, ‘always be closing’ sales culture.

We’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Sales is not a dirty word.

Remind yourself of this: a sales team, by any other name,

is still a group of individuals focused on acquiring and
accelerating new revenue for the company. In product-led
businesses, this often takes the form of customer experience,
customer support and / or customer success. When
approached in the right way, layering in a human sales
effort into your product-led business can accelerate growth
while maintaining envy-worthy unit economics.

But what should sales look like in a product-led company?

The fundamentals of sales remain the same – it’s all about
engaging the right people, at the right time, with relevant
information. But the who, when, and how have to adapt to
support a product-led business.

62 Product-led Growth Playbook Sales 63

 Who
You’re generating hundreds, maybe thousands of leads
and creating great buzz, but are you attracting the right
customers? You should consider three things here:
1. Target market segment is as important as ever. Do
you understand your ideal buyer? It’s more than LTV
and CAC – it’s important to understand how you stack
up against your competition, relative deal size, speed
of adoption and the value you deliver to the end
user. Any sales and marketing tactics you do employ
should be targeted at this segment.
2. Your product is a lead gen tool. A free product
(should you choose to employ this PLG pricing
technique) is offered to show value and build
credibility as part of the sales process, but every
lead is not created equal; neither is every customer.
Leverage your knowledge of your ideal customer
profile to point your resources at the right trial and /
or free product leads and use your product to help
identify those people.
3. Let them come to you. Steer clear of traditional
high-activity, dial for dollars, inside sales plays. Cold-
calling is not for your business. You have users in your
product who will naturally hand raise – they will want
help, to have a question answered, or request a new
feature. Align your resources to supporting these
engaged users and moving them further through your
funnel.
64 Product-led Growth Playbook
When
You don’t have infinite resources, so an “early and often” or
traditional “swarm” sales approach does not work. Instead,
you need to make every interaction count. There are three
places to focus the time of your ‘sales’ team:
1. Support: Provide an exceptional customer
experience from the first time they touch your product.
Put SLAs in place for response time, ensure that every
question is answered quickly and issues are resolved
to offer a frictionless product experience. These
are not quota-hungry salespeople, but helpers and
product evangelists who are educating your users
and the market
2. Conversion: The fastest way to move the
needle is to get more out of the leads you’re
already generating. Review your entire funnel for
opportunities for 1:1 or 1:many touch points and
opportunities to remove drop off points. Examples
include, but are not limited to, live chat, public
training, FAQs, minimizing setup time, mobile
experience and more.
3. Retention: This is really about adoption. Don’t wait
until you see signs of churn, spend time in the first few
days / weeks / months monitoring usage. A product
that is core to an employee’s or company’s daily life
is hard to replace. There are many creative ideas to
increase adoption. These might include prompting
users with in-app messaging, offering services
support in initial setup, extending a referral bonus to
Sales 65
 enhance your network effect, sharing tips & tricks via CASE STUDY: HOW SLACK CONVERTS
automated email touch points and more. 30% OF THEIR FREE USERS TO PAID

How
Repeat after me: less is more. Don’t try to engage a buyer
in an hour long demo, refrain from pitching in every
conversation, resist the urge to over-engineer or over-
complicate interactions. Instead:
They have 1.25+ million paid users. Their trial to paid
conversion rate is sitting at 30%.
There’s just no better way to put it: Slack is absolutely kickin’
ass in the SaaS world.

1. Employ a bottoms up sale. It’s about arming power
users with a business case to take to the decision
maker. Show value to your end user and make your
product core to their everyday activities. By focusing
on the end user experience and encouraging them
to invite their coworkers in, you extend the network
effect and build a base of users that can grow to
department and / or company-wide adoption
2. Get your compensation plan right. Don’t pay your
sales / customer success people on metrics that
encourage traditional sales behavior. If you track
dials or talk time, that is what they will focus on. Tie
them to what really matters: CSAT, NPS and net churn.
But they don’t need me to tell the world how well they’re
doing. Just look at their stats:
»» They are the fastest growing SaaS company. Of all time.
»» They have gone from being valued at $0 to $4 BILLION.
In just 4 years.
»» They are adding $1 million in new contracts. Every. 11.
Days.
»» They have 77% of the Fortune 100 using their software.
»» They have 4 million active daily users.

Now here’s the fun part. At some point, you may start to
move up market. Do not fall into the trap of assuming the
same style of selling will scale with you. Be flexible, be
nimble and be ready to adapt. What works for an SMB
market may not work as deal size grows. If the day comes
where you need an experienced enterprise sales team to
close 6-figure deals, my advice is this: embrace it, but don’t
let that style creep into your core segment or detract from the
success you’ve had in a product led model.

66 Product-led Growth Playbook Sales 67

 Growth chart for Slack’s active daily users [Source]

Oh, and did I mention they did ALL of this without a million-
dollar marketing technique, a fancy email strategy, or
a pushy outbound sales team? Actually, it wasn’t until
recently that Slack even bothered hiring salespeople and
they managed to become a $1.1 billion company before
bringing on a CMO.
As you can see, Slack’s “free” plan still comes with a bunch
There’s a lot that Slack has done right with its marketing of good benefits and is perfectly usable on its own.
to get to 4 million active daily users. But perhaps more
impressive is Slack’s conversion rate. While other SaaS So, to see how Slack really won over those paid users, I
companies hope and pray to convert up to 10% of free users signed up for a free account to see how they’d try to convert
to paid, Slack converts a whopping 30%. me. Here are the three big things that jumped out during my
experiment:
So, how did Slack do it? Let’s find out.
1. Slack has an excellent onboarding process.
The first thing to look at is the layout of Slack’s freemium
model. 2. Slack isn’t salesy in the slightest.

68 Product-led Growth Playbook Sales 69

 3. Slack puts customer success at the core of all they
do, motivated by their innovative “Fair Billing” pricing
model.
Let’s analyze the first item: Slack’s excellent onboarding
process.
Part of what holds other companies back from converting
their freemium users is that these customers often don’t
completely understand how to use the product or they don’t
truly realize all the product’s benefits and applications.
But Slack has an extra challenge in overcoming this. Slack
isn’t a product that’s sold to a single person – but one sold to
a team. Which means they have a lot of people to convince.
Slack responding to a Medium comment as an “extension”
of their customer onboarding
70 Product-led Growth Playbook
So what they do is simple, yet brilliant: they provide all the
training, tutorials, and resources the customer needs to get
the rest of his or her team on board. That way, the customer
isn’t stuck with the burden of training and Slack can ensure
that the information they put out shows Slack in its best light
possible.
Here is a quick example. As part of Slack’s onboarding
process, all new users who login for the first time are instantly
taken through a tutorial.
Slack’s Help Center is also very well laid-out, showing new
customers exactly what steps they need to take next. Plus,
they also have a ton of helpful info on their YouTube channel
and in their Medium publication.
A famous memo (which has since been republished on
Medium) that Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield
Sales 71
 sent to his team on July 31, 2013, gives us an insight into
why Slack has prioritized such a strong, easy-to-follow
onboarding process:
“Putting yourself in the mind of
someone who is coming to Slack
for the first time — especially a real
someone, who is being made to try
this thing by their boss, who is already
a bit angry because they didn’t have
time for breakfast, and who is anxious
about finishing off a project before they
take off for the long weekend — putting
yourself in their mind means looking
at Slack the way you look at some
random piece of software in which you
have no investment and no special
interest.”
Now onto the second item: Slack’s non-salesy sales process.
When I went through the process of a free sign-up, here’s
what I discovered: I never, at any point, actually felt like I
was being “sold to.”
First of all, if we look at Slack’s homepage again, you
won’t even find an option to sign up for the paid plan.
And after clicking that green “Get Started” button, you are
automatically taken through the process to become a free
72 Product-led Growth Playbook
user…without encountering a single message about the paid
plan the entire time.
Even if you don’t go through and click that “Get Started”
button here or on another page, you won’t find any sort
of lead gen elsewhere on the website asking for your
name, title, phone, company or website. In other words,
Slack doesn’t seem to have any sort of process in place
to gather full lead data or contact info (they only ever ask
for your email address). Yet another way Slack avoids that
salesperson persona.
Now, after I signed up, I kept waiting for some sort of email
autoresponder campaign aimed at getting me to convert to
a paid user. But yet…there was nothing. Not a single email
was sent to me with a mention of upgrading to the paid plan.
Is Slack missing out on conversions by not trying to upsell
it’s free users? Maybe. But it’s obviously not bothering them
enough to change it. So for now, at least, Slack will remain
true to their “not a salesperson” voice.
Sales 73
 The third item ties the first and second together: Slack puts
customer success at the core of all they do.

Though Slack’s first step with any new customer is an easy

onboarding process, that alone is not enough…they also
need to keep their customers actually using the product by
offering genuine, non-salesy help.

And Slack has no better motivation for this than their

innovative “Fair Billing Policy.”

The email Slack send you when you get credit back

This “Fair Billing” model keeps Slack’s whole team ultra-

In simple terms, here’s how their policy works: if a Slack user
stops using the software for 14 days, Slack will give you
your money back through prorated credit. Slack’s Head of
Customer Success explained this himself at the very end of
this panel at SaaStock London (29:25 to 30:40).
Slack’s user consumption model forces Slack’s growth
to correlate with their customers’ growth, otherwise this
happens:
accountable to providing awesome onboarding and a
comfortable user experience so they can onboard as many
active users as possible. Sales people can’t just sell an
account and then move on.
For this reason, Slack MUST make sure their product is fully
integrated into their users’ day-to-day work…or they won’t
get paid. Instead of pushing the customer toward the paid
plan, they just set usage limits after a high level of user
consumption has taken place. Limits like this:
»» Chat history that stops after 10,000 messages
»» File storage that stops after 5GB

74 Product-led Growth Playbook Sales 75

 »» App integrations that stop after 10 apps
Slack then uses very strategic in-app messaging (that triggers
based on usage limits) to convert freemium users into paid
customers, like this:
In-app messages like the one pictured above prompt users
to upgrade to a paid plan (but are only shown to the user
once Slack has been fully integrated into their day-to-day
work). This prompts the customer when they are likely to be
most receptive to Slack’s sales message.
Most enterprise software pricing is designed to charge you
per user upfront regardless of how many people on your
team are actively using the software (for example, if you buy
1,000 seats but only use 100, you still get charged for 1,000).
But as you can see, Slack’s untraditional pricing model is
wholly at odds with what most enterprise companies do.
Yet, it’s working. The proof is in the data: Slack has converted
1.25M+ of their 4M+ users into paid users.
Want to peek inside the other facets of Slack’s impressive
growth strategy? Go to openview.vc/slack-growth
76 Product-led Growth Playbook
FULLSTORY’S SCOTT VOIGT ON WHY
SALES IS NOT BINARY
You either love or hate sales. You can go all-in on self-service
and let the machine handle customer acquisition. Or you
can hire an army of reps and let the humans sell. There is no
in-between.
This commonly held view of sales is wrong. Sales is not
binary.
FullStory’s Scott Voigt says the answer is a bionic approach
to sales. Man plus machine. Human, but more than human.
Empathy and Clarity
Two of FullStory’s guiding principles – empathy and clarity –
led them away from sales early on.
“A lot of people don’t enjoy being sold to, including the folks
at FullStory,” says Voigt. “As a company, we are super leery
of anything where we have to talk to someone in order to
see the product.”
Having to talk to someone suggests that something needs
to be hidden – most likely the product’s cost or complexity.
“We just want to cut to the chase and quickly understand the
product and pricing.”
Valuing empathy leads to the Golden Rule. If FullStory
doesn’t like being sold to, it would be weird if they turned
around and aggressively sold their product to others.
Sales 77
 Valuing clarity leads to transparency. Simplicity and clarity is
easier said than done when it comes to product marketing,
website copy and pricing pages. But customers are
desperate for it.
Does It Work for Everybody?
FullStory’s focus on empathy and clarity means the company
leads with self-service. I mean, look at the messaging on
their awesome sales page:
But self-service doesn’t work for all customers. “I wish it
worked for everybody. But in fact there is a correlation
between the size of a company and the complexity of the
buying process for that company,” says Voigt.
Complexity means your buyer needs help. The self-service
machine falls down under the weight of a complex buying
process. And if one of your humans doesn’t step in, the
78 Product-led Growth Playbook
customer will turn to someone else’s human (and ultimately
someone else’s product) to help them.
Empathy isn’t partial. You need to cater to the needs of both
the “leave me alone” people AND the “help me buy your
product” people.
Making Things Bionic
Empathetically coming to the aid of people with complex
buying processes means embracing sales. But after initially
avoiding it, FullStory wasn’t eager to do sales in the
traditional way.
“Old school customer interactions are remarkably inefficient,”
Voigt says. “Hire an army of sales reps to get new customers
and a boatload of support folks to keep them happy. We’re
living in the 21st century and there has to be a better way.”
This is where FullStory’s third operating principle comes
in – making things bionic. It means making a human
process more scalable through technology. But it’s not
robotic automation stamping out generic crap. “The human
component is the heart of bionics, because of that all-
important first principle: Empathy. Being bionic helps us scale
empathy. It allows us to be human with an ever-growing
number of customers,” Voigt explains.
What does this look like in practice? FullStory provides
intelligent, personalized customer success to anyone using
the product. All users are created equal, and there is no
fundamental distinction between prospects and customers.
Sales 79
 “If you’ve ever tried our product, you’re a customer.” Onward!

Similarly, there is no fundamental distinction between sales,
support and success efforts. “If everyone is a customer, then
we want everyone to be successful.”
The intelligence and personalization comes from FullStory
using its own product to deliver an amazing customer
experience. A common example is receiving a proactive
note saying, “It looks like you may have tripped on a bug
earlier today. I’m really sorry about that. We’ve fixed it now
and you should be all set!”
We’ve been sold a false dichotomy – that you must choose
either the path of self-service or sales, but not both. But there
is a better way, and it’s called bionics. Man plus machine.
Human, but more than human.
Onward to a better future for your company and your
customers!

FullStory does the same thing when it sees users expressing

frustration at the product during a session. We’ve all been
there – the site is slow and you aggressively click the mouse
in hopes of a response. FullStory calls this user behavior
“rage clicks.” The team gets a rage click alert and the
customer gets a message asking how they can help.

“Customers love this kind of care and

attention. It leads to better customer
conversion and satisfaction, but it
would be impossible without bionics.”

80 Product-led Growth Playbook Sales 81

 CLOSING

As we’ve discussed in this book, a product-led growth

strategy can be an efficient and effective way to grow your
customer base, win loyalty and scale your business. But,
by its very nature, a product-led strategy is only ever as
successful as the underlying product. Product-led companies
aim to build truly stellar products that put the user, not the
buyer, front and center. They avoid jargon in their marketing,
instead preferring a more casual, colloquial approach. And
most importantly, PLG companies simplify and streamline
everything from the actual product to its marketing, sales
and pricing all in an effort to make onboarding new users as
clear and as seamless as possible.

We hope that this book inspires you to explore how

implementing a PLG strategy could positively impact your
bottom line, lead to happier customers and revamp your
business for the better.

As with all things, PLG is an evolving philosophy. We look

forward to introducing new components of this strategy and
learning from SaaS operators like you who implement and
iterate as you learn and grow.

82 Product-led Growth Playbook Closing 83

 AUTHORS
BLAKE BARTLETT
Blake is a Partner at OpenView
where he helps identify value
and lead investments in
product-led businesses driving
market dislocation. He’s led the
firm’s investments in Expensify,
Pantheon and Logikcull.
LIZ CAIN
Liz is the VP of Go-to-Market
at OpenView where she leads
market insights, recruiting and
sales and marketing strategy
as part of the firm’s Expansion
Platform. The GTM practice
focuses on helping portfolio
companies acquire and retain
the right customers and talent.
84 Product-led Growth Playbook
ASHLEY MINOGUE
Ashley is a Market Strategist
at OpenView where she helps
the firm’s portfolio companies
scale efficiently. She focuses on
refining their marketing strategy
and operations by leveraging
data to optimize lead funnel
conversion, demand gen tactics
and customer segmentation.
KYLE POYAR
As Director of Market Strategy,
Kyle helps OpenView’s portfolio
companies accelerate top-line
growth through segmentation,
positioning, packaging &
pricing, customer insights,
channel partner programs, new
market entry and go-to-market
strategy.
Authors 85
 ABOUT OPENVIEW

OpenView is an expansion stage venture firm helping build

software companies like Instructure, Kareo, Datadog and
Expensify into market leaders. Through our Expansion
Platform, we help companies hire the best talent, acquire
and retain the right customers and partner with industry
leaders so they can dominate their markets. Our focus on
the expansion stage makes us uniquely suited to provide truly
tailored operational support to our companies. Learn more
about OpenView at openviewpartners.com.
 CEOS, FOUNDERS AND PRODUCT LEADERS
TRUST OPENVIEW TO DELIVER PRIMARY
RESEARCH, TACTICS, ADVICE AND STRATEGIES
ON EVERYTHING FROM PRODUCT-LED
GROWTH TIPS AND TACTICS FOR SALES,
MARKETING AND BEYOND.

“Product-led growth has enabled companies to scale at a

speed beyond the imaginable. With this book, you too can
learn how to apply a PLG strategy and take your business to
the next level.”

– Pedro Magriço, Head of Product Growth, Typeform

“The breakthrough moment for us on the HubSpot Sales

products came when we started thinking of our (amazing) sales
team as a “Revenue API” for the product; wherever we could
develop a product that would sell itself we did that, and where
the product team needed help converting users to customers
we generated leads rotating them to sales. Product-led growth
has taken us to the next level.”

– Christopher O’Donnell, VP of Product, HubSpot

“Meetup’s product-led growth strategy equipped us to succeed

with a B2B audience while staying true to our core product.
This playbook is a must-read for anyone looking to build or
optimize a product-driven business.”

– Brian Lafayette, VP of Revenue, Meetup